Walking Through the Horizon: Poems

THIRD INTERLUDE: Getting Defensive

THIRD INTERLUDE Getting Defensive Charles H. Brough loved Arkansas. He truly did. And he told anyone who would listen. He trotted out tables of statistics to laud Arkansas’s farmers. He quoted from her poets and historians. He trumpeted the beauty of her hills and streams. He scanned the pages of Who’s Who for the names of successful businessmen and military officers who divulged even the most tenuous link with the Wonder State. Few people ever embraced an American state with as much passion and purpose as Brough embraced Arkansas. Despite the fact that Arkansas was his adopted home state—or perhaps because of it—Brough also proudly assumed the mantle as the old Bear State’s number-one defender. If the state of Arkansas had dispatched a search party to track down an ideal defender, a leader whose qualifications and mindset flew in the face of everything a scoffing national public thought it knew about Arkansas, it would have brought back someone very much like Charles Hillman Brough. He was in almost every sense the antithesis of the nineteenthcentury Arkansawyer. Born to well-to-do Yankee parents in Utah and raised by an uncle and aunt, idealistic carpetbagger educators in Mississippi, Brough was a precocious boy who graduated at the top of his Mississippi College class at the age of seventeen. By the time he turned twenty-six, Brough had earned a Ph.D. in economics, history, and jurisprudence from the Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from the University of Mississippi, sandwiching between these two academic forays a three-year stint as a college professor during which he published his dissertation and other studies and lectured extensively across the state of Mississippi. One year later, in 1903, a faculty position at the University of Arkansas brought Brough to the state that he would make his home for the next three decades.1 In the annals of Arkansas, Charles H. Brough is best remembered as the state’s most progressive governor, an intellectual with the political skill to shepherd through a conservative and decidedly less intellectual statehouse a variety of reforms and progressive statutes and the bipartisan appeal to receive the endorsement of the Republicans in his reelection campaign of 1918. For our purposes, his activities after leaving the governor ’s mansion are even more important. During the first half of the 1920s, Brough toured the nation as both a chautauqua speaker and as the publicity 119 BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 119 agent for an organization attempting to boost economic development in Arkansas. In both roles the former governor became a “‘walking advertisement for Arkansas.’”2 As his adopted state’s self-appointed defender, Brough took on Arkansas’s detractors, challenging anyone who would dispute his glowing account of the Wonder State. He met the H. L. Menckens of the world with wagging finger and self-righteous indignation and, in so doing, highlighted a crucial element in the evolution and perpetuation of the Arkansaw image. Brough was only the most prominent in a long line of Arkansas defenders, a group whose earnest and sometimes shrill attacks on the state’s ridiculers served, ironically, to highlight the more negative aspects of the Arkansaw image over the positive ones and to underscore the inferiority complex of a self-conscious and defensive element of Arkansas’s better sort. Brough in no way resembled the Arkansawyer of legend. He may not have been a typical Arkansawyer, but his substantial education and even his status as an Arkansan-by-choice made Brough a good candidate for Arkansas’s defense. Only rarely did the Arkansawyers who were the targets of derision and condescension—the rural and small-town folk who, many (including Arkansans) thought, lived lives circumscribed by backwardness, illiteracy, and spiritual barrenness—challenge the Arkansaw image in a 120 ✧ GETTING DEFENSIVE Charles H. Brough. Courtesy of Old State House Museum, Little Rock, Arkansas. BLEVINSfinalpages:Layout 1 4/28/10 3:50 PM Page 120 public forum. This is not surprising. These were the very people whose lack of education and low socioeconomic standing rendered them the least likely to have access to the means of public protest, even when they were aware of the negative stereotypes that dogged their state. But protesting negative stereotypes was far down the list of priorities for the vast majority of Arkansawyers; the business of surviving and providing for...